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I LOVE DICK (Episode 7)

A Jill Soloway TV series for Amazon Prime, adapted from the lauded feminist novel by Chris Kraus. I LOVE DICK is set in a colourful academic community in Marfa, Texas. It tells the story of a struggling married couple, Chris and Sylvere, and their obsession with a charismatic professor named Dick. I LOVE DICK charts the unraveling of a marriage, the awakening of an artist and the deification of a reluctant messiah. (Starring: Kevin Bacon, Kathryn Hahn, Griffin Dunne).

Writer and director Logan Kibens served as a consulting producer on set, curating the homages that appear in brief and tantalizing clips throughout the show, offering a truncated survey of feminist film history.

“It starts as a response to Kevin Bacon’s statement in the pilot that women can’t work from outside their oppression,” Kibens told HuffPost. “He challenges Chris and says women can’t be good artists. That moment felt to me like a calling of the ancestors. We’re ready to go into battle and address this question.”

The film clips that appear are thematically linked to what’s happening in the show at the times they emerge, highlighting the real-life artists whose work came before.

“I was responding to the scripts as they were coming in,” Kibens said. “It was like a really hard crossword puzzle. Every piece had to relate to one of the main characters and what she was going through while keeping in mind the theme of the show. Taken together, the clips offer a short history of women in film.”

Taken from films that date between 1964 and 2012, the clips are culled from film, dance, pornography, and video and performance art. They feature iconic feminist artists like Marina Abramovic and Carolee Schneemann and contemporary luminaries like Petra Cortright. The clips loudly reject Dick’s hypothesis that women don’t make good films, showing that women have long been making work that is provocative, sensual and rigorous, even if men have chosen to look the other way.

In an interview with HuffPost, Jill Soloway explained her desire to remix the recipe of a television show, departing from the tired blueprint of storytelling from a male perspective. “We can do anything with TV we want to,” Soloway said, “including using it as a crucible to show off the work of all these women who have never been known or seen.”

Incorporating a loosely connected network of female voices, Soloway and Kibens disrupt the tradition of the singular male storyteller. Instead of even relying on Kraus’ lone voice to tell the story, Soloway invites the spirits of her collaborators and influences into the fold, creating a collaborative collage that refuses to converge at a single point.

“I’m trying to experiment with what we can do with TV,” Soloway said, “using sampling, almost like hip-hop, to bring these other voices in to tell this story.”

A clip of our video piece 'Mouth to Mouth' (1995) is used in episode 7: Described by Tate London, as a short, black-and-white video depicting a repeated action enacted by the artists, during which Smith and Stewart share the same breath. Kibens: “This is a perfect way to visualize the tentative intimacy between a married couple. It’s probably the longest clip featured in the show. It also doesn’t have music. The artists didn’t want us to use any score. With this piece I feel like we were really asking: can we push it this far?”